Sending thank-yous

A receipt is a tax document. A thank-you is a relationship. They are different jobs and the second one is the one that produces second gifts.

Timing beats wording

A plain thank-you within 48 hours does more than a beautiful one three weeks later. The window where a donor is most receptive is measured in days.

Relae surfaces new gifts for thanking as they arrive, so the job is a short list rather than something you remember to do.

What Relae drafts

Open an item and Relae writes a draft grounded in that donor’s actual giving. The draft knows whether this is a first gift, a repeat gift, a major gift, or a return after a gap, and writes differently for each.

Screenshot to comeA thank-you draft for a first-time donor, showing the greeting, four short sentences, and a sign-off, with the donor's giving summary beside it and an edit area for the fundraiser.

The draft is a starting point. The sentence you add about why this donor gave is the part that lands.

The house style

Drafts follow a fixed style: short, plain and warm, three to five sentences, no sales language. Some rules are deliberate and are not options:

No ask in a thank-you. A thank-you that asks for something is not a thank-you.
No invented impact. It will not claim your gift fed forty families unless you say so.
No “valued donor” or “friend”. It uses their name.
No em dashes, which is a house rule across everything Relae writes.

The draft arrives written. You edit it and send it, and the editing is where it stops sounding like a template and starts sounding like you.

Make it yours

The one sentence worth adding is the specific one. What this donor cares about, what they said last time, that you saw them at the November concert. Relae does not know those things unless they are in the record, and they are what makes the note read as written by a person.

Thank a first-time donor twice

A first gift is a test. The donor is finding out what happens next.

Relae runs a second touch a couple of months later: a short check-in with no ask at all, whose only job is to make a new donor feel part of something. This is the single highest-return habit available to a small shop, because a donor who gives twice is many times more likely to keep giving than one who gives once.

Who is excluded

A donor record carries contact and solicitation flags, including deceased, do not solicit, and preferences for no email, no calls and no mail. Set them on the record and they travel with the person.

Ticket buyers who gave

Where someone turned a ticket into a donation, they are a donor and worth thanking as one. These are surfaced separately, ranked by the most recent performance, so you can thank them while the show is still in mind.

Capturing notes, for recording what came back.
Working the worklist